Ayşe Çelikkol
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199769001
- eISBN:
- 9780199896943
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199769001.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
THis book offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. The book argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new ...
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THis book offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. The book argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that privileged domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, and their position gained increasing support. Amid economic transformation, Britons pondered the effects of vertiginous circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? What would be the fate of the nation and the empire if commerce were uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a privileged role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated sprawling global markets and the fluidity of capital. Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century.Less
THis book offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. The book argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that privileged domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, and their position gained increasing support. Amid economic transformation, Britons pondered the effects of vertiginous circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? What would be the fate of the nation and the empire if commerce were uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a privileged role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated sprawling global markets and the fluidity of capital. Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century.
Karin E. Gedge
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195130201
- eISBN:
- 9780199835157
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195130200.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
Nineteenth-century American readers regularly encountered powerful and paradoxical images of clergy and women in many fictive genres, a reflection of the cultural tensions manifested in the ...
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Nineteenth-century American readers regularly encountered powerful and paradoxical images of clergy and women in many fictive genres, a reflection of the cultural tensions manifested in the contemporary pastoral relationship. Sensational novelists such as George Lippard exposed the monstrous incongruity of the “reverend rake.” Sentimental novelist Susan Warner constructed a romantic clerical hero who was both benevolent and despotic in his relationship with the female protagonist, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s minister was impotent, dependent on the women who supported him. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s enduring Scarlet Letter portrayed the pastor as an unworthy saint and Hester Prynne as the worthy sinner. Even pious memoirs and parsonage novels acknowledged the intrusion of sexuality, “something peculiar and insidious” in Stowe’s words, which inevitably corrupted the spiritual relationship between pastors and women. Only transforming it into a marital relationship could, to some degree, resolve the inherent sexual tension.Less
Nineteenth-century American readers regularly encountered powerful and paradoxical images of clergy and women in many fictive genres, a reflection of the cultural tensions manifested in the contemporary pastoral relationship. Sensational novelists such as George Lippard exposed the monstrous incongruity of the “reverend rake.” Sentimental novelist Susan Warner constructed a romantic clerical hero who was both benevolent and despotic in his relationship with the female protagonist, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s minister was impotent, dependent on the women who supported him. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s enduring Scarlet Letter portrayed the pastor as an unworthy saint and Hester Prynne as the worthy sinner. Even pious memoirs and parsonage novels acknowledged the intrusion of sexuality, “something peculiar and insidious” in Stowe’s words, which inevitably corrupted the spiritual relationship between pastors and women. Only transforming it into a marital relationship could, to some degree, resolve the inherent sexual tension.
SARAH BILSTON
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199272617
- eISBN:
- 9780191709685
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272617.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book has presented a historical account of the role of the transitional girl in later 19th-century literature. Focusing on the position of the girl in women's writing, it has argued that ...
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This book has presented a historical account of the role of the transitional girl in later 19th-century literature. Focusing on the position of the girl in women's writing, it has argued that fictional treatments of girls' growth helped clear a literary and cultural space for representations of the New Woman's awakening to disaffected consciousness. The book's primary objective has been to treat Victorian women's writing with respect — to consider the novels of once-popular writers worthy of sustained literary criticism. The texts have yielded complex yet intelligible narratives about the operations of gender in 19th-century England. This book has revealed that, as a matter of historical fact, the construction of femininity and the concept of separate spheres were open to interpretation in even some of the most conservative women's literature. This book serves as a reminder that the New Women were not fighting alone and that theirs was not the only mode of progress.Less
This book has presented a historical account of the role of the transitional girl in later 19th-century literature. Focusing on the position of the girl in women's writing, it has argued that fictional treatments of girls' growth helped clear a literary and cultural space for representations of the New Woman's awakening to disaffected consciousness. The book's primary objective has been to treat Victorian women's writing with respect — to consider the novels of once-popular writers worthy of sustained literary criticism. The texts have yielded complex yet intelligible narratives about the operations of gender in 19th-century England. This book has revealed that, as a matter of historical fact, the construction of femininity and the concept of separate spheres were open to interpretation in even some of the most conservative women's literature. This book serves as a reminder that the New Women were not fighting alone and that theirs was not the only mode of progress.
Matthew Kaiser
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804776080
- eISBN:
- 9780804778947
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804776080.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for ...
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Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future. A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. This book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. The author gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.Less
Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future. A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. This book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. The author gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469640921
- eISBN:
- 9781469640945
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640921.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ...
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In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding of the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.Less
In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding of the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.
Kay Yandell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190901042
- eISBN:
- 9780190901073
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190901042.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse ...
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In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse telegraphers began to organize “online” for safer working conditions. Women telegraphers entered electric speech forums. These interactions inspired the creation of what this book dubs “telegraph literature”—the fiction, poetry, social critique, and autobiography that experiences of telecommunication inspired authors from vastly different social locations to write throughout nineteenth-century America. The telegraphic virtual inspired such canonical authors as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, alongside such lesser known authors as Lida Churchill and Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield, to explore how seemingly instantaneous, disembodied, nationwide speech practices challenged American conceptions of self, text, place, nation, and God.Less
In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse telegraphers began to organize “online” for safer working conditions. Women telegraphers entered electric speech forums. These interactions inspired the creation of what this book dubs “telegraph literature”—the fiction, poetry, social critique, and autobiography that experiences of telecommunication inspired authors from vastly different social locations to write throughout nineteenth-century America. The telegraphic virtual inspired such canonical authors as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, alongside such lesser known authors as Lida Churchill and Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield, to explore how seemingly instantaneous, disembodied, nationwide speech practices challenged American conceptions of self, text, place, nation, and God.
James B. Salazar
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814741306
- eISBN:
- 9780814786536
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814741306.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet ...
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From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable “stuff,” has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity. This book reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of “character” in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, the book uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. The book offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining—and contesting—the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.Less
From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable “stuff,” has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity. This book reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of “character” in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, the book uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. The book offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining—and contesting—the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.
Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, and Helena Wahlström
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719089596
- eISBN:
- 9781781707289
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089596.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter situates the study in both literary and socio-historical contexts, focusing on earlier discussions of the American orphan figure in literary and social history and elaborating especially ...
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This chapter situates the study in both literary and socio-historical contexts, focusing on earlier discussions of the American orphan figure in literary and social history and elaborating especially on literature as cultural memory. The chapter traces the central position of orphans in nineteenth-century American literary history as it has been constructed in the twentieth century; orphans have played major roles in a dominant white male tradition in criticism, but also in gendered and ethnic challenges to that tradition. Previous critical discussions of orphans typically focus on children’s literature, or on nineteenth-century literature, but nevertheless offer useful insights into the historically shifting roles and cultural work of orphan characters, linked to social and political developments in the US. The chapter also addresses ideas of the orphan, childhood, and family, and how these ideas operate in social and academic debates over multiculturalism, the US canon, and national belonging.Less
This chapter situates the study in both literary and socio-historical contexts, focusing on earlier discussions of the American orphan figure in literary and social history and elaborating especially on literature as cultural memory. The chapter traces the central position of orphans in nineteenth-century American literary history as it has been constructed in the twentieth century; orphans have played major roles in a dominant white male tradition in criticism, but also in gendered and ethnic challenges to that tradition. Previous critical discussions of orphans typically focus on children’s literature, or on nineteenth-century literature, but nevertheless offer useful insights into the historically shifting roles and cultural work of orphan characters, linked to social and political developments in the US. The chapter also addresses ideas of the orphan, childhood, and family, and how these ideas operate in social and academic debates over multiculturalism, the US canon, and national belonging.
Victoria Morgan and Clare Williams (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311369
- eISBN:
- 9781846315688
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315688
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book explores how the energy of belief came to manifest itself in nineteenth–century literature. This manifestation was evident as much in expressions of newly formed personal relations to ...
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This book explores how the energy of belief came to manifest itself in nineteenth–century literature. This manifestation was evident as much in expressions of newly formed personal relations to ideas, as in the appropriation of religious discourse in writing of the period. By re–visioning the place of belief in nineteenth–century writing this collection provides forays into current thinking, both on the position occupied by belief within nineteenth–century literary studies, and within contemporary culture itself.Less
This book explores how the energy of belief came to manifest itself in nineteenth–century literature. This manifestation was evident as much in expressions of newly formed personal relations to ideas, as in the appropriation of religious discourse in writing of the period. By re–visioning the place of belief in nineteenth–century writing this collection provides forays into current thinking, both on the position occupied by belief within nineteenth–century literary studies, and within contemporary culture itself.
Jan-Melissa Schramm
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- June 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198826064
- eISBN:
- 9780191878176
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198826064.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
In the early nineteenth century, the biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the novel, the oratorio, and poetry, but spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The ...
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In the early nineteenth century, the biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the novel, the oratorio, and poetry, but spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The maintenance of this ban on religious theatrical representation was underpinned by Protestant anxieties about impersonation, performance, and the power of the image that persisted long after the Reformation. But by mid-century, the turn towards medievalism in visual culture, antiquarianism in literary history, and the ‘popular’ in constitutional reform placed England’s pre-Reformation past at the centre of debates about the uses of the public stage and the functions of a truly national theatrical literature. In this changing climate, how was England’s rich heritage of vernacular sacred drama to be understood? This book probes the tensions inherent in the idea of ‘incarnational art’—whether, after the Reformation, ‘presence’ was only to be conjured up in the mind’s eye by the act of reading, or whether drama could rightfully reclaim all the implications of ‘incarnation’ understood in the Christian tradition as ‘the word made flesh’. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the recovery of the medieval mystery plays and their subsequent impact on the national imagination. The second half of the book looks at the gradual relaxation of the ban on the performance of sacred drama and asks whether Christian theatre can ever be truly tragic, whether art perpetually reanimates or appropriates sacred ideas, and whether there is any place for sacramental thought in a post-Darwinian, industrial age.Less
In the early nineteenth century, the biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the novel, the oratorio, and poetry, but spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The maintenance of this ban on religious theatrical representation was underpinned by Protestant anxieties about impersonation, performance, and the power of the image that persisted long after the Reformation. But by mid-century, the turn towards medievalism in visual culture, antiquarianism in literary history, and the ‘popular’ in constitutional reform placed England’s pre-Reformation past at the centre of debates about the uses of the public stage and the functions of a truly national theatrical literature. In this changing climate, how was England’s rich heritage of vernacular sacred drama to be understood? This book probes the tensions inherent in the idea of ‘incarnational art’—whether, after the Reformation, ‘presence’ was only to be conjured up in the mind’s eye by the act of reading, or whether drama could rightfully reclaim all the implications of ‘incarnation’ understood in the Christian tradition as ‘the word made flesh’. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the recovery of the medieval mystery plays and their subsequent impact on the national imagination. The second half of the book looks at the gradual relaxation of the ban on the performance of sacred drama and asks whether Christian theatre can ever be truly tragic, whether art perpetually reanimates or appropriates sacred ideas, and whether there is any place for sacramental thought in a post-Darwinian, industrial age.
Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- August 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198806516
- eISBN:
- 9780191844126
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198806516.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for ...
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Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. As the contributors to this volume show, though, literature has continued to address how different conceptions of sacrifice have been invoked in times of war to convert losses into gains or ideals. While those conceptions have sometimes been rooted in a secular rationalism that values lost lives in terms of political or national victories, spiritual and religious conceptions of sacrifice are also still in evidence—as with the ‘martyrdom operations’ of jihadis fighting against the ‘war on terror’. The volume’s fifteen chapters each present fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict. Most of the authors discussed are major war writers (e.g. Wordsworth, Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Bowen), but important writers who have received less critical attention are also featured (e.g. Dora Sigerson, Richard Aldington, Thomas Kinsella, Nadeem Aslam). Discussion ranges across a variety of genres: predominantly novels and poetry (particularly elegy and lyric), but also memoirs and some films. The range of literature examined complements the rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice that the contributors discuss—including scapegoating, martyrdom, religious faith, tragedy, heroism, altruism, ‘bare life’, atonement, and redemption.Less
Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. As the contributors to this volume show, though, literature has continued to address how different conceptions of sacrifice have been invoked in times of war to convert losses into gains or ideals. While those conceptions have sometimes been rooted in a secular rationalism that values lost lives in terms of political or national victories, spiritual and religious conceptions of sacrifice are also still in evidence—as with the ‘martyrdom operations’ of jihadis fighting against the ‘war on terror’. The volume’s fifteen chapters each present fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict. Most of the authors discussed are major war writers (e.g. Wordsworth, Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Bowen), but important writers who have received less critical attention are also featured (e.g. Dora Sigerson, Richard Aldington, Thomas Kinsella, Nadeem Aslam). Discussion ranges across a variety of genres: predominantly novels and poetry (particularly elegy and lyric), but also memoirs and some films. The range of literature examined complements the rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice that the contributors discuss—including scapegoating, martyrdom, religious faith, tragedy, heroism, altruism, ‘bare life’, atonement, and redemption.
Anna Pilz and Whitney Standlee (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719097584
- eISBN:
- 9781526115225
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719097584.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Irish women writers entered the international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. This collection of new essays explores how Irish women, officially ...
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Irish women writers entered the international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. This collection of new essays explores how Irish women, officially disenfranchised through much of that era, felt inclined and at liberty to exercise their political influence through the unofficial channels of their literary output.
By challenging existing and often narrowly-defined conceptions of what constitutes ‘politics’, the chapters investigate Irish women writers’ responses to, expressions of, and dialogue with a contemporary political landscape that included not only the debates surrounding nationalism and unionism, but also those concerning education, cosmopolitanism, language, Empire, economics, philanthropy, socialism, the marriage ‘market’, the publishing industry, the commercial market, and employment. The volume demonstrates how women from a variety of religious, social, and regional backgrounds – including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, and the Ulster writers Ella Young, Beatrice Grimshaw, and F. E. Crichton – used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership. Close readings of individual texts are framed by new archival research and detailed historical contextualisation. Offering fresh critical perspectives by internationally-renowned scholars including Lauren Arrington, Heidi Hansson, Margaret Kelleher, Patrick Maume, James H. Murphy, and Eve Patten, Irish Women’s Writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty is an innovative and essential contribution to the study of Irish literature as well as women’s writing at the turn of the twentieth century.Less
Irish women writers entered the international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. This collection of new essays explores how Irish women, officially disenfranchised through much of that era, felt inclined and at liberty to exercise their political influence through the unofficial channels of their literary output.
By challenging existing and often narrowly-defined conceptions of what constitutes ‘politics’, the chapters investigate Irish women writers’ responses to, expressions of, and dialogue with a contemporary political landscape that included not only the debates surrounding nationalism and unionism, but also those concerning education, cosmopolitanism, language, Empire, economics, philanthropy, socialism, the marriage ‘market’, the publishing industry, the commercial market, and employment. The volume demonstrates how women from a variety of religious, social, and regional backgrounds – including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, and the Ulster writers Ella Young, Beatrice Grimshaw, and F. E. Crichton – used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership. Close readings of individual texts are framed by new archival research and detailed historical contextualisation. Offering fresh critical perspectives by internationally-renowned scholars including Lauren Arrington, Heidi Hansson, Margaret Kelleher, Patrick Maume, James H. Murphy, and Eve Patten, Irish Women’s Writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty is an innovative and essential contribution to the study of Irish literature as well as women’s writing at the turn of the twentieth century.
Patrick R. O’Malley
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198790419
- eISBN:
- 9780191831669
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790419.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, European Literature
Focusing on literary and cultural texts from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, this book argues that in order to understand both the literature and the varieties of nationalist ...
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Focusing on literary and cultural texts from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, this book argues that in order to understand both the literature and the varieties of nationalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland, we must understand the various modes in which the very notion of the historical past was articulated. It proposes that nineteenth-century Irish literature and culture present two competing modes of political historiography: one that eludes the unresolved wounds of Ireland’s violent history through the strategic representation of a unified past that could be the model for a liberal future; and one that locates its roots not in a culturally triumphant past but rather in an account of colonial and specifically sectarian bloodshed and insists upon the moral necessity of naming that history. From myths of pre-Christian Celtic glories to accounts of medieval Catholic scholarship, from the rise of the Protestant Ascendancy to narratives of colonial violence against Irish people by British power, Irish historiography strove to be the basis of a new nationalism following the 1801 Union with Great Britain, and yet it was itself riven with contention.Less
Focusing on literary and cultural texts from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, this book argues that in order to understand both the literature and the varieties of nationalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland, we must understand the various modes in which the very notion of the historical past was articulated. It proposes that nineteenth-century Irish literature and culture present two competing modes of political historiography: one that eludes the unresolved wounds of Ireland’s violent history through the strategic representation of a unified past that could be the model for a liberal future; and one that locates its roots not in a culturally triumphant past but rather in an account of colonial and specifically sectarian bloodshed and insists upon the moral necessity of naming that history. From myths of pre-Christian Celtic glories to accounts of medieval Catholic scholarship, from the rise of the Protestant Ascendancy to narratives of colonial violence against Irish people by British power, Irish historiography strove to be the basis of a new nationalism following the 1801 Union with Great Britain, and yet it was itself riven with contention.
Kay Yandell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190901042
- eISBN:
- 9780190901073
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190901042.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of ...
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Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures’ telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, and nation for potential enactment in the embodied world. Telegraphies opens with the literatures of such Native telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to reconceive common notions of telecommunications technologies as synonymous with capitalist industrialization, and to analyze the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation the book integrates visions of Morse’s electromagnetic telegraph, with its claims to speak new, coded words and send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the continent. To the many and various telegraphies this book considers, American authors often reacted with a mixture of wonder, hope, and fear. Writers as diverse as Sarah Winnemucca, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, among others, craft poetic odes, memoirs, and novels that envision how the birth of perceived-instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine. While some celebrate far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical manifest destiny to overspread America’s primitive cultures, others reveal how telecommunication empowers the previously silenced voice to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as the body remains confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography.Less
Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures’ telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, and nation for potential enactment in the embodied world. Telegraphies opens with the literatures of such Native telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to reconceive common notions of telecommunications technologies as synonymous with capitalist industrialization, and to analyze the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation the book integrates visions of Morse’s electromagnetic telegraph, with its claims to speak new, coded words and send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the continent. To the many and various telegraphies this book considers, American authors often reacted with a mixture of wonder, hope, and fear. Writers as diverse as Sarah Winnemucca, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, among others, craft poetic odes, memoirs, and novels that envision how the birth of perceived-instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine. While some celebrate far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical manifest destiny to overspread America’s primitive cultures, others reveal how telecommunication empowers the previously silenced voice to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as the body remains confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography.
Joel Porte
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300104462
- eISBN:
- 9780300130577
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300104462.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also ...
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Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America's foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protege. The truth, this book maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. This book focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. It traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture”, produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture.Less
Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America's foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protege. The truth, this book maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. This book focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. It traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture”, produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture.
Helen Groth
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748669486
- eISBN:
- 9780748695171
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748669486.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which those in the business of both early and pre-cinematic entertainment often combined literary and visual media in an endeavour to align the moving ...
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This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which those in the business of both early and pre-cinematic entertainment often combined literary and visual media in an endeavour to align the moving images on the screen with the moving images scrolling through the minds of their audiences. Echoing an enduring philosophical tradition of enlisting familiar optical devices to materialise the mechanisms of perception, memory, dreams, and associative streams of consciousness, these convergences between literary and popular visual media invited an analogical interplay between reading and viewing. This chapter considers the ways in which this inter-medial reciprocity aligns with a parallel history of the emergence of a modern psychology that was keen to understand and describe the dynamic processes that generate moving images in the mind, including reading, viewing and dreaming.Less
This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which those in the business of both early and pre-cinematic entertainment often combined literary and visual media in an endeavour to align the moving images on the screen with the moving images scrolling through the minds of their audiences. Echoing an enduring philosophical tradition of enlisting familiar optical devices to materialise the mechanisms of perception, memory, dreams, and associative streams of consciousness, these convergences between literary and popular visual media invited an analogical interplay between reading and viewing. This chapter considers the ways in which this inter-medial reciprocity aligns with a parallel history of the emergence of a modern psychology that was keen to understand and describe the dynamic processes that generate moving images in the mind, including reading, viewing and dreaming.
Ari Joskowicz
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804787024
- eISBN:
- 9780804788403
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804787024.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
Between 1800 and 1840, new and competing visions of secularism emerged in Germany and France. In the 1820s, when the first generations of romantics adopted medieval Catholicism as a positive model, ...
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Between 1800 and 1840, new and competing visions of secularism emerged in Germany and France. In the 1820s, when the first generations of romantics adopted medieval Catholicism as a positive model, liberals in Germany and France began to identify Catholicism with the alleged backwardness of their political adversaries. In these conflicts, anticlericalism emerged as an oppositional ideology, associated with the critique of the restoration regimes and anti-Enlightenment movements. This chapter explores how Jewish writers of the early nineteenth century employed this new form of oppositional anticlericalism in order to take on different opponents. Turning to writers such as Heinrich Heine, Joseph Salvador, Léon Halévy, and Saul Ascher, this chapter argues that the Jewish anticlericalism of this era served simultaneously as an intervention into the politics of Jewish emancipation, an aesthetic statement, and a revolutionary program.Less
Between 1800 and 1840, new and competing visions of secularism emerged in Germany and France. In the 1820s, when the first generations of romantics adopted medieval Catholicism as a positive model, liberals in Germany and France began to identify Catholicism with the alleged backwardness of their political adversaries. In these conflicts, anticlericalism emerged as an oppositional ideology, associated with the critique of the restoration regimes and anti-Enlightenment movements. This chapter explores how Jewish writers of the early nineteenth century employed this new form of oppositional anticlericalism in order to take on different opponents. Turning to writers such as Heinrich Heine, Joseph Salvador, Léon Halévy, and Saul Ascher, this chapter argues that the Jewish anticlericalism of this era served simultaneously as an intervention into the politics of Jewish emancipation, an aesthetic statement, and a revolutionary program.
Theodore Ziolkowski
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226983639
- eISBN:
- 9780226983660
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226983660.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is in one sense a chronicle of the steadily intensifying contest of faith and reason—a process registered in such contemporary accounts as John W. ...
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The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is in one sense a chronicle of the steadily intensifying contest of faith and reason—a process registered in such contemporary accounts as John W. Draper's The Conflict between Science and Religion (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's classic History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). As is often the case, the poets were among the first to sense the mood of the age. The nineteenth-century loss of faith finds its earliest literary expression, whether elegiacally or mordantly, in such poems of the late 1860s and 1870s as those by Matthew Arnold and James Thomson. This chapter examines religion in nineteenth-century literature, the conflict of faith and reason, and the extremes of absolute deconversion and of deconversion followed by reconversion, as represented in the contrasting autobiographical accounts of Philip Gosse and Leo Tolstoy. These extremes exemplify the principal patterns evident in several of the major novels of lost faith that begin to be written and published at the beginning of the twentieth century.Less
The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is in one sense a chronicle of the steadily intensifying contest of faith and reason—a process registered in such contemporary accounts as John W. Draper's The Conflict between Science and Religion (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's classic History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). As is often the case, the poets were among the first to sense the mood of the age. The nineteenth-century loss of faith finds its earliest literary expression, whether elegiacally or mordantly, in such poems of the late 1860s and 1870s as those by Matthew Arnold and James Thomson. This chapter examines religion in nineteenth-century literature, the conflict of faith and reason, and the extremes of absolute deconversion and of deconversion followed by reconversion, as represented in the contrasting autobiographical accounts of Philip Gosse and Leo Tolstoy. These extremes exemplify the principal patterns evident in several of the major novels of lost faith that begin to be written and published at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Rachel Sykes
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526108876
- eISBN:
- 9781526132444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526108876.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and speculates about the potentiality of quiet as a literary aesthetic. It argues that the introvert was a disruptive presence in many ...
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This chapter maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and speculates about the potentiality of quiet as a literary aesthetic. It argues that the introvert was a disruptive presence in many nineteenth-century American texts, including those by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville where quiet is associated with a failure to speak or an absence of mind. In the early twentieth century, quiet protagonists were integral to the ‘novel of consciousness’ favoured by many writers including Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust who equated quietness of character with a rich and dramatic internal life. Yet, as the century developed, quiet became marginalised within a Western culture that seemed increasingly defined by its noise and sources of overstimulation. This chapter therefore concludes with a discussion of quiet’s potentiality as both an aesthetic and as a mode of engagement with contemporary fiction.Less
This chapter maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and speculates about the potentiality of quiet as a literary aesthetic. It argues that the introvert was a disruptive presence in many nineteenth-century American texts, including those by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville where quiet is associated with a failure to speak or an absence of mind. In the early twentieth century, quiet protagonists were integral to the ‘novel of consciousness’ favoured by many writers including Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust who equated quietness of character with a rich and dramatic internal life. Yet, as the century developed, quiet became marginalised within a Western culture that seemed increasingly defined by its noise and sources of overstimulation. This chapter therefore concludes with a discussion of quiet’s potentiality as both an aesthetic and as a mode of engagement with contemporary fiction.
Padma Rangarajan
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263615
- eISBN:
- 9780823266456
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263615.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic ...
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At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic considerations of the contexts that shape translations and that, in turn, reveal translation’s truer function as a locus of power. This book explores translation’s complex role in shaping literary and political relationships between India and Britain. Rejecting the idea that colonial translation was fundamentally a tool for oppression, it argues that colonial translation changed both colonizer and colonized and undermined colonial hegemony as much as it abetted it. With authors ranging from William Beckford, Sir William Jones, and Sydney Owenson to Rudyard Kipling, Edward FitzGerald, and Max Müller, the book covers the diverse political and cultural consequences of orientalist literature from eighteenth-century exotic tales to the mystic poetry of the fin de siècle and from translation proper to its ethnological, mythographic, and religious variants. Searching for translation’s trace enables a broader, more complex understanding of intellectual exchange in imperial culture as well as a more nuanced awareness of the dialectical relationship between colonial policy and nineteenth-century literature.Less
At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic considerations of the contexts that shape translations and that, in turn, reveal translation’s truer function as a locus of power. This book explores translation’s complex role in shaping literary and political relationships between India and Britain. Rejecting the idea that colonial translation was fundamentally a tool for oppression, it argues that colonial translation changed both colonizer and colonized and undermined colonial hegemony as much as it abetted it. With authors ranging from William Beckford, Sir William Jones, and Sydney Owenson to Rudyard Kipling, Edward FitzGerald, and Max Müller, the book covers the diverse political and cultural consequences of orientalist literature from eighteenth-century exotic tales to the mystic poetry of the fin de siècle and from translation proper to its ethnological, mythographic, and religious variants. Searching for translation’s trace enables a broader, more complex understanding of intellectual exchange in imperial culture as well as a more nuanced awareness of the dialectical relationship between colonial policy and nineteenth-century literature.
